I, for one, have been getting pretty pissed off for a while with the need to carefully vet the installer of a new app and uncheck all the Googollox it wants to punt at you. That's an old adware trick: "You said yes to the install and that implies all our stuff as well".

Now this.

Personally I reckon that if Mr Ballmer were to come to such a conclusion, he might be on to something. The only issue I have here is that it's such a sensible conclusion I can't for the life of me imagine Steve Ballmer coming to it. I reckon he'd be far more likely to ring the MS Marketing department and bollock them for not thinking of it first.

Google has a virus!!

Google has a virus!!

Google has a virus!!

..hur hur hur, surely this is much bigger noise than OSX having a virus??

come on el reg, viva la sensationalism!

Oh dear, now go back a read the article again.

It should be Google IS a virus.

It should be Google IS a virus.

It should be Google IS a virus.

It should be Google IS a virus.

and you cnat use an exclamation mark unles its about Yahoo!

you said Firefox is usefull? Personally, I'd want a browser that doesn't have half a dozen bugs in it a month, requiring major update after major update, on TOP of being incompatable with a good percentage of websites, and which is slow and bulky on a system. I mean, if you don't mind the first, use IE, don't mind the secon, use Opera. Don't mind all 3 - well then hell maybe you deserve friedfox, and all that other crap.

How can anyone who is sane of mind and not an MS employee possibly advocate the usage of IE?

Your reasonings are terrible:

1) Bugs being found is surely a good thing? It means they get fixed, as opposed to the developers sitting with their fingers in their ears going "lalalalala" and not wanting to admit that there might be flaws. Also, can you not see that the speed in which bugs are found means there's a good following for Firefox and the users report things quickly. Also, the speed in which bugs get fixed and new version is released speaks volumes about the developers being on the ball.

2) Firefox is only incompatible with websites that don't adhere to web standards properly. It's far stricter that IE with code, which should really ensure that people write sites properly in the first place and don't just leave it with rubbish code that only IE can display correctly (generally cause it was written in Frontpage, but that's beside the point). If more people used FF whilst developing websites, we'd have better, stronger code and less crap.

3) Yeah, OK, FF is kinda bulky. Still, it runs better than IE for me (x86 and x64) so really can't see a downside. There aren't that many people using systems that can't handle it nowadays. A quick glance at system requirements for both browsers shows that the latest version of FF runs on lower versions of Windows than MS's own IE, and the rest of the base system requirements are the same.

And so, to my conclusion:

You sir, are wrong.

What you have to remember is that Firefox is Open Source, so *anybody* can look for bugs -- and as long as good guys outnumber bad guys, more of those bugs will end up being fixed than exploited. Open Source means never pretending that anything is perfect, because false claims can -- and will -- be called out.

If access to Source Code (even without permission to make and distribute copies; the proliferation of unauthorised copies of Windows, Office, Photoshop &c. demonstrates that withholding Source Code is by no means an effective anti-piracy technique) were mandatory, then I suspect that the Opera people would end up with a lot of egg on their faces. If there was nothing in there for them to be ashamed of, they'd already have let us look inside it.

And why, in discussions of web browsers, does nobody *ever* mention Konqueror? Am I the only person here who uses it?

Unless you are too much of an idiot to be able to download and install what you want individually.

You mean that POS that I have to use when I'm booting off a Knoppix disc to fix someone's POS windows computer?

"And why, in discussions of web browsers, does nobody *ever* mention Konqueror? Am I the only person here who uses it?"

Yes.

Because no self respecting person would use Knoppix, nor would they use KDE. Konqueror is far, far, far down the list on what people would use.

Of course, to get back on topic, google is the anti-christ when they're trying to help people with little knowledge (oh shit... knowledge starts with k.... must be kde) about home computing. Obviously a blatant free-software marketing ploy.

When they give away cash to *nix companies, or to research, or to the like they're jesus, the tooth fairy and a bleeding stripper all rolled into one.

Which is, why aren't we doing something to make porn surfing safer!

Hmmm... unless I'm very much mistaken, Safari is based on Konqueror so a lot more people use (a modified version of) Konqueror than you might initially expect.

I don't use Konqueror, but I am a web monkey and as far as I can tell Konqueror, Safari, Opera and Firefox ALL cause a lot less headaches with regards to CSS or JS (DHTML or AJaX) than IE. It's just a pain that IE still makes up 85% of the browser market so you have to waste time implementing crappy IE fudges to make up for the browser being so horrendously broken (although to be fair it is getting better very, very slowly - IE7 is marginally better than 6).